Another link babble post brought to you by yours truly!

[sarcasticchick]

for starters, a faux noise link. I KNOW. i can't believe i'm doing this. linking to faux noise? wtf??? however, it is an interview with a white catholic priest who sums up the whole reverand wright (non)issue beautifully. he schools the reporter who should NOT be a journalist for as much as he a) acts like a freshman in college working on his

Comments

[sarcasticchick]

but a lot, maybe most, Americans go around a lot of the time obvious to anything happening in other countries.

there are other countries other than the US? no shit? /snark

that women who didn't want children were psychologically unhealthy, unnatural, selfish

i've gotten similar responses, especially from my own mom, but more in a guilt-trip sense. "why don't you want kids? was i not a good enough parent?" like it was a personal offense that i didn't want kids despite my choice having nothing to do with her, how i was raised, etc...

i'm glad SF has grown out of that line of thought. for the most part. at least most of what i've read recently has not been inclined along those lines.

oh, i'm bitter. but i still retain hope. and now i sound like a campaign slogan for the obama campaign. but i do, for the most part, believe that people are moving away both from the prejudice and the sexism wiht every generation, though there are still your idiots out there. of course, that doesn't mean the objectification hasn't slowed, in fact, i think it's gotten worse. but i can deal/ignore objectification. it's hard to ignore prejudice/sexism.

[eumenidis]

i've gotten similar responses, especially from my own mom

I didn't get that response from my mom--she thought I didn't think anyone would marry me. (Mom has a long history of grabbing the wrong end of the stick.) What really pissed me off were the damn men, who were just as promiscuous as they could manage while also rejecting any responsibility for consequences, yapping that there was something wrong with women who didn't want children.

Oh, damn; I have to break off. There's a storm front coming in, there was hail the size of baseballs to the west, & tornado warning.
Later?

[sarcasticchick]

of course, men have a responsibility for consequences!

i thought that was the whole point of men regulating birth control access and denying the right of the woman to make choices for her own body...in favor of abstinence-only programs. because then, poor men, don't have any consequences to deal with! /snark

stay safe! tornados are a PITA. yay, welcome tornado season. urf. *remembers to buy batteries for her flashlight next time she's at the store*

[sarcasticchick]

Thought has little to do with human sexuality &/or reproduction; mostly, it's about instinct & emotion. & basically, sex is about DNA replicating itself regardless of the effect its self-replication has on its environment, or the beings it uses for that purpose (f'rinstance, digger wasps laying their eggs in the bodies of other insects). Human males' moral codes, policies, etc. have always been about trying to control the behavior of females, & to me, greatly resembles the attempts of other male primates to control "their" females.

Yeah, tornados are PITA; hail & flooding are no joy either. I don't like to break off in mid-comment, I feel it's rude, but my mother can't hear disaster sirens, so I need to be alert to grab her & run to shelter.

[eumenidis]

Reply, Mark II:

Well, eugenics is an idea mostly discredited during the last couple of generations, along with other deterministic sociobiological & psychological theories, not to mention the much larger female readership of SF these days, writers would hardly come right out & state those ideas baldly, even if they had them, & if they did, they wouldn't get past the editors. That being said, though, it seems to me that most SF these days seems to be more general adventure/thriller/drama using the tropes of SF rather than even the most superficial speculation of how contemporary ideas & developments in the sciences could effect people & societies.

You can be bitter without becoming cynically self-serving, which is, I'm afraid, what all too many of my generation has done. As for moving away from the sexism, I remember a quote from George Washington: "Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom"--& all too many women are quite happy with sexism, as long they're getting what they want. As for objectification, I suspect that the world today, & very likely American culture particularly, is generally prone to that.